Rebanaditas

Posted on 2016.09.25 at 22:13

Jammies has been out of town this week. He gets back tomorrow.

This week has been the type of week where you look up and see that there are nine children in your house, under your care. We've been playing with the neighbors a lot. I took seven children to a Mexican cultural heritage festival yesterday. There were traditional ballet folklorico performances, arts and crafts for the kids - pinatas to paper mache and fill with Mexican candy, some sort of foil medallion creation that probably has a technical name, volcanoes. There was free tamales, tacquitos, nachos, hot dogs, watermelon juice, and pineapple juice. I think my crew of seven ate most of the food.

When we arrived, the opening ceremony was wrapping up. I got a photo with Lloyd Doggett, which was pretty cool. Also our mayor and two councilmembers, one of whom is the one I'm the treasurer for, for her reelection campaign. Lloyd Doggett is a big reason that they gerrymandered Texas about 15 years ago, before it was the cool thing for all the shithead states to do. He used to represent Austin. Now his district is this:

I thought about Mexican heritage and how it's generally considered a good thing when a young kid decides that they want to learn more about their roots. About how, if you had a generation or two which no longer spoke Spanish, and one of the kids decided to learn, and learn some dancing and how to cook tamales and so on, we'd celebrate it. (Who is 'we' in that sentence? Soccer moms? I don't know.) This was all a thinly veiled attempt to look at myself through the wrong end of the telescope. Wouldn't it be a shame to let thousands of years of tradition lapse, because the anti-semitism wore away at one or two generations in a row?

Those watermelon lollipops - Rebanaditas - are my favorite. They're covered in chili powder, and they're salty and sour and sweet. They don't taste anything like watermelon, though

Anyway, having eight kids next door changes the dynamic of the household rhythm dramatically. I like that Pokey and Hawaii constantly want to bolt outside and run around. I like the neighbor kids - they're sweet and kind, generally. Usually the oldest five of them come over to play. Sometimes it's calm and you think, "Isn't it amazing that this many kids is basically calm?!" but even when it's calm, it's a pretty big mess.

I don't like the excessive amounts of junk food. On Wednesday, E. Messily cooked us a lovely jambalaya and homemade cornbread. The kids all nibbled and grumped and finally said they were full. Then they went and ate corndogs at the neighbor's house. (The insult was particularly poetic since they had literally been served sausage and cornbread, just not on a stick.) There is just constant free-flowing Starbursts and spoonfuls of Nutella and HotPockets and frozen pizza and on and on and on. I mean, we have all that stuff too, but, but, but. It seems beyond my control.

Anyway. I'm behind in patience, grading, sleep, and the entire house is sticky and disheveled.